. – immigrationcourtside.com

PROFESSOR LINDSAY HARRIS: SEEKING ASYLUM IN THE US IS A PROTECTED LEGAL RIGHT! — SO WHY ARE TRUMP, SESSIONS, &. CO. PERVERTING THE LEGAL SYSTEM TO ABUSE CHILDREN, TORTURE WOMEN, & KILL ASYLUM SEEKERS WITHOUT A FAIR CHANCE TO PLEAD THEIR CASES?— Our Immoral & Lawless Leaders Are The Biggest Threat To The Survival Of Our Republic!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/seeking-asylum-isnt-a-crime-why-do-trump-and-sessions-act-like-it-is/2018/06/29/dc4cf136-7a7c-11e8-93cc-6d3beccdd7a3_story.html

The immigration system, if you believe President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, is rife with fraud and abuse. And while Trump’s administration is hostile to all immigrants, it’s people seeking asylum whom he and his advisers most scorn. Sessions says “dirty immigration lawyers ” push their clients to make “fake claims” to trigger court proceedings that might allow them to stay in the United States. He seems to see the entire concept of asylum as a “loophole.”

Trump declared last weekend on Twitter that we should send migrants out of the country “with no Judges or Court Cases.” He says immigration laws are a “joke” and that it’s “ridiculous ” that people who appear at the border seeking asylum can’t immediately be sent back to where they came from.

In reality, immigrants who seek asylum are not criminals, even though they are now being charged as such. Their lawyers are simply giving them basic information. And the “zero tolerance” policy that led the administration for a time to separate children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border shows how radically Trump wants to change laws and practices, developed over decades, to provide a haven for people fleeing persecution and weed out undeserving claims. As it happens, most of those seeking admission at our southern border are not economic migrants seeking a better life but instead asylum seekers fleeing for their lives.

CONTENT FROM PRIME VIDEO

“When you have diverse views, it makes the outcome for all people better.” – Justice Anne McKeigRead More

Sessions is going to extraordinary lengths to break the system that distinguishes between asylum claims with merit and ones that should be denied. He has categorically declared that some people who used to be eligible for asylum, such as survivors of domestic abuse or gang violence, no longer are.

As an asylum lawyer over the past decade, I have represented women fleeing domestic violence, forced marriage, rape, genital cutting and more. I have represented girls forced into relationships with gang members and boys fleeing recruitment into gangs at gunpoint. I have represented lesbian, gay and transgender individuals from all over the world seeking protection from persecution by their communities or governments. A couple of months ago, my immigration clinic at the University of the District of Columbia School of Law represented a Honduran woman whose partner raped her twice daily, beat her while pregnant and bashed her head against a wall. She tried to escape within Honduras and even to El Salvador seven times, but each time, her partner found her and threatened her life. Her calls to the police were ignored. Ultimately, she fled to save her life, and an immigration judge granted her protection in April before Sessions changed the law. Thousands more in her situation may be categorically denied protection.

[Compassion for immigrant children can help. But it isn’t enough.]

Seeking asylum in the United States has never been easy, by design. But under Trump, it’s become arbitrarily harder — and impossible for some. Even before the 2016 election, border officials claiming allegiance to Trump began turning back asylum seekers in greater numbers. I recall clients who said a border official told them: “There is no asylum. Trump is going to be president, and you’ll all be sent home.” Since his inauguration, problems in the asylum system have only increased.

The first challenge for asylum seekers is just being able to apply. They must either be at the border or within the United States to claim protection — they cannot seek asylum from outside. Some enter the country with a tourist, study or work visa, but these are difficult to obtain. Others approach the U.S. border and ask for protection, or cross the border without permission and are detained by immigration officials before filing their asylum applications.

Under international law and a Clinton-era U.S. law known as “expedited removal,” officials must screen all individuals they encounter around the border for potential asylum claims. If someone indicates she is afraid to return to her home country, border officials must refer her to an asylum officer for a “credible fear” interview to decide whether she is eligible for asylum. Legally, the Border Patrol simply makes a referral for the interview; however, border agents without appropriate training are increasingly taking the law into their own hands. In early 2017, for example, Human Rights First documented 125 cases of Border Patrol agents unlawfully turning back asylum seekers. Lately, border officers tell asylum seekers to “come back later,” turning away one family nine times. This violates our legal obligation under Article 33 of the Refugee Convention and under our own Refugee Act not to return an asylum seeker to a place where she faces a threat to her life or freedom.

A “zero tolerance” policy is particularly problematic for asylum seekers. The Refugee Convention states that nations shall not penalize asylum seekers for irregular entry. Indeed, since 1987 , the Board of Immigration Appeals, our highest immigration tribunal has directed immigration judges to forgive irregular entry because of the circumstances of seeking asylum.

But asylum standards are becoming more restrictive. In June, Sessions reversed a grant of asylum for a Salvadoran woman fleeing domestic violence, single-handedly undoing two decades of progress for gender-based asylum claims. He also changed the standard for asylum to require not only that the government in a migrant’s home country is unwilling or unable to protect the asylum seeker from harm, but also that the government is actively condoning persecution by nonstate actors — a higher bar for applicants to meet. Asylum claims should be adjudicated on a case-by-case basis, but Sessions’s order states that generally, those fleeing domestic violence or gang violence will not pass a credible-fear interview. The Justice Department has already circulated preliminary guidance to asylum officers to use the decision in future cases.

[Sessions is criminalizing immigration violations. That upends decades of history.]

The credible-fear interview is only the first step for asylum seekers. Next, they must present their case before an immigration judge and face an experienced prosecutor on the other side. An asylum seeker will probably wait several years for that day in court, given the backlog of more than 700,000 cases pending before the approximately 350 immigration judges. Most of the applicants won’t have lawyers: Immigrants in detention are represented only 14 percent of the time, and overall only 37 percent of immigrants have representation in their legal cases. Although asylum grant rates vary wildly depending on the judge or asylum officer, in the past decade, between 15 and 44 percent of claims were approved.

Trump’s family separation policy led to widespread mobilization of new advocates and voices expressing outrage and calling for reform. But this is no time to look away. Asylum claims must be decided on their individual merits, not with technicalities or categorical bars. Lives are at stake.

******************************

The Government violates asylum seekers’ rights at ports of entry.
Then the Government “criminalizes” asylum seekers who cross the border seeking to exercise their legal rights.
Courts and prosecutors are tied up on abusive, wasteful, racially motivated misdemeanor prosecutions of asylum seekers.
Real criminals like drug traffickers therefore go unprosecuted because the Government is too busy persecuting asylum seekers.
The Government manipulates asylum laws and leans on its “captive” Immigration Courts to deny asylum seekers their legal rights.
Meanwhile, the real culprits who are responsible for these racist-inspired attacks on our legal system and the human dignity of asylum applicants not only go unpunished but are the leaders of our Government.
Had enough of our Government’s disgraceful conduct? Join the New Due Process Army to fight for the rights of vulnerable asylum seekers. Harm to the least among us is harm to all!

PWS

07-02-18

TAL@ CNN: SESSIONS’S MOVES TO UNDERMINE DUE PROCESS IN IMMIGRATION COURTS NOT ENOUGH FOR TRUMP, WHO WANTS TO DO AWAY WITH CONSTITUTION — Huckabee Sanders Spouts Nonsense! (What Else Is New?)

Trump fumes over immigration courts Sessions has focused on

By: Tal Kopan, CNN

President Donald Trump in recent days has fumed about the immigration courts that handle cases of people seeking entry into the US.

But Trump’s fixation on the courts and the judges who staff them flies in the face of what his attorney general has been trying to do to reshape the courts to align with the President’s vision, including hiring more immigration judges and restricting asylum laws.

The President tweeted that those stopped at the border should be simply told they can’t enter, rather than going through the system.

“When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no judges or court cases, bring them back from where they came,” Trump tweeted on Saturday.

Press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters Monday that “virtually all Americans” agree that drawn-out court proceedings don’t make sense for migrants who enter the country illegally. Trump, she said, “would certainly like to see more expedited removal.”

“Just because you don’t see a judge doesn’t mean you aren’t receiving due process,” she said.

The immigration courts decide whether immigrants have a legal right to stay in the US or should be deported — and those cases include people arriving at the border as well people from the interior of the US, who may or may not have had legal status at some point.

But Trump’s suggestion has several problems, including the fact that there are fewer than 350 immigration judges nationwide and the Justice Department has budgeted for only 100 more.

In addition, the suggestion that the immigration courts could be done away with altogether would likely fly in the face of the Constitution and a host of domestic and international laws that bestow rights on everyone in the US and crossing the border, regardless of whether they are citizens.

More: http://www.cnn.com/2018/06/25/politics/trump-sessions-immigration-judges-courts/index.html

**************************

There is no Due Process without an impartial decision maker (lots of doubt as to whether any Immigration Judge working for Jeff Sessions can be considered “impartial”).
Jeff Sessions has nothing to do with virtue. His disingenuous, racist, White Nationalist policies are the polar opposite of “virtue.”
As the Supreme Court has said, Due Process takes time — sometimes a lot, sometimes less.
Trump’s outrageous proposals violate our Constitution, our statutory law, and two international conventions to which we are party.
There is no crisis for the United States, except the unnecessary one that Trump and Sessions have created with their lawless behavior.
But, there is a crisis in the Northern Triangle for which we are at least partially responsible.
The stakes for the refugees are literally life or death — Trump and Sessions’s dehumanizing rhetoric is beyond disgusting.
Even those who fail to qualify for protection after full hearings likely face rape, torture, extortion, severe beatings, mutilation, or death upon return. We actually should be protecting more, not fewer, of them.

PWS

06-25-18

DREAMER DEBACLE: MY THREE “TAKEAWAYS”

Trump and the GOP aren’t going to help the Dreamers. While the majority of GOP voters are favorably disposed to Dreamers, it isn’t a priority for them. Unlike the Dems, GOP legislators aren’t getting pressure from their constituents to solve the Dreamer problem. Meanwhile, “the base” doesn’t like the Dreamers. Without Trump’s support, the GOP isn’t going to press the issue. With Trump’s active opposition and veto threats, the Dreamers are “dead meat” as far as the GOP is concerned.

The Democrats can’t help the Dreamers from their minority position. The minority doesn’t get to control the agenda, particularly over the President’s active opposition. No, it doesn’t make sense to blame Schumer for sacrificing “leverage” he never really had. The shutdown didn’t work. The Dems and the Dreamers were losing the public opinion battle. Since the GOP is basically out to destroy Government (other than the military) they didn’t feel much pressure to make concessions to the minority to get it reopened.

The Dreamers aren’t going anywhere. It’s a tossup whether the Supremes will intervene in Trump’s favor in the Dreamer case. We will probably find out within the next week. Even if the Supremes do Trump’s bidding, there is no way Trump can deport 700,000 Dreamers. Unlike the semi-helpless women and children detained at the border that Trump & Sessions like to pick on, the Dreamers have resources, community support, and access to good lawyers. They have lots of possible defenses to removal and some affirmative causes of action that should keep the legal system occupied for decades, or at least until we get regime change and wiser legislators finally put the Dreamers on the path to citizenship.

PWS

02-18-18

MORE LUMPS FOR TRUMP FROM LOWER COURT ON REFUGEE BAN!

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/366337-federal-judge-partially-lifts-trump-ban-on-refugees

Jesse Byrnes and Julia Manchester report for The Hill:

“A federal judge in Seattle has partially lifted a ban on certain refugees imposed by the Trump administration.

U.S. District Judge James Robart issued a ruling on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Jewish Family Service on Saturday.

The groups had urged the judge, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, to halt the ban on refugees from some majority-Muslim nations.

Robart ruled that the federal government should process certain refugee applications, saying his order doesn’t apply to refugees who do not have a “bona fide” relationship with an individual or an entity in the U.S.

The ban originally went into effect after the president issued an executive order reinstating the refugee program “with enhanced vetting capabilities” in October.

The ACLU argued that a memo sent to the president from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke and Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats saying certain refugees should be banned unless security was enhanced did not provide enough evidence for why more security was needed.

The judge wrote Saturday that “former officials detailed concretely how the Agency Memo will harm the United States’ national security and foreign policy interests” and said his ruling restores “refuge procedures and programs to the position they were in prior” to the ban, which he noted included thorough vetting of individuals traveling to the U.S.

The lawsuits stemming from the ACLU and Jewish Family Services were consolidated and involved refugees who have been blocked from coming to the U.S.”

*************************

Read the complete article over at The Hill at the link.

Like other recent lower court rulings against the Travel Ban, I expect this will be largely a “symbolic victory” for the plaintiffs. Based on the Supremes’ actions on other “Travel Ban” cases to date, I expect that the Administration will eventually prevail in its effort to restrict refugee admissions from abroad.

PWS

12-26-17

MILESTONE: Nolan Publishes 50th Article In “The Hill” — Read It Here! — “Like it or hate it, Trump’s immigration enforcement is failing”

http://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/364839-like-it-or-hate-it-trumps-immigration-enforcement-program-is-failing

Nolan writes:

“The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has released its FY2017 immigration enforcement report. It indicates that President Trump has reduced the number of illegal border crossings, but it shows no progress at all on reducing the number of undocumented aliens who are in the United States already.

An immigration court backlog crisis is making it extremely difficult for him to move new cases through removal proceedings.

. . . .

Trump’s internal removal statistics show an average of 7,637 removals a month over an eight-month period. If he maintains this rate, he will remove approximately 91,644 undocumented aliens a year from the interior of the country, which would only be 366,564 removals by the end of his term in office.

That isn’t even enough to keep up with the number of aliens that become a part of the undocumented population in a single year as overstays. According to the Fiscal Year 2016 Entry/Exit Overstay Report, 739,478 aliens who entered the United States in FY2016 on temporary nonimmigrant visas did not leave at the end of their authorized period of stay.

According to the Pew Research Center, the undocumented immigrant population in 2015 was 11.3 million, and I think the actual number is much larger. I explain why in my analysis of PEW’s methods for making such estimates.

The backlog crisis.

At a Center for Immigration Studies panel discussion on the immigration court backlog, Immigration Judge Larry Burman said, “I cannot give you a merits hearing on my docket unless I take another case off. My docket is full through 2020, and I was instructed by my assistant chief immigration judge not to set any cases past 2020.”

This is going to get much worse.”

***********************************

Congratulations, Nolan, on your milestone! I know that writing 50 published articles is a monumental achievement and contribution to the immigration dialogue. Thanks for sharing your analysis with all!

Read Nolan’s complete article (with charts that I omitted) at the link.

PWS

12-14-17

TAL @ CNN: TRUMP’s CLAIM THAT IMMIGRATION RESTRICTIONS WOULD PREVENT TERRORISM RINGS HOLLOW — Critics Say More Likely That Campaign Of Hate, Fear, Loathing, & Isolation Promotes Radical Terrorism!

http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/12/politics/new-york-attacker-domestic-radicalization-trump-administration/index.html

Tal reports:

“But given that Ullah began his radicalization in the US years after immigrating, and that the previous New York attacker, Sayfullo Saipov, was also radicalized in the US, according to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, critics are accusing the administration of disingenuously pushing its aggressive immigration agenda.

Reacting to Cissna’s turn at the podium, Gregory Chen, director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, called it “baldly transparent” that the administration could not make a sufficient connection between the immigration programs it is targeting and terrorism.
“They are just using this as a way to scapegoat and attack the immigration system, this particular incident, when there’s no demonstrated connection between cutting back on the family-based system and protecting our national security,” Chen said. “That was so transparent from that (briefing).”
Experts say family-based migration achieves the goals of assimilation that the administration says it wants, by connecting individuals from abroad with family members already settled in the US.
All immigrants to the US are screened for security risks, which Cissna acknowledged on Tuesday. Although diversity lottery winners are chosen at random and family-based migrants are allowed in based on their relatives, all of them must pass eligibility checks by the US and be interviewed before they can receive visas.

Critics argue that the administration is ignoring the threat of online radicalization by terror groups in its pursuit of dramatic cuts to the legal immigration system.
“It’s worse than not effective, it’s counterproductive,” said Michael Breen, president and CEO of the Truman Center and Truman National Security Project, whose membership includes former national security officials and veterans of the Obama and Clinton administrations.
Breen said that responding effectively to terrorist ideologies requires creating a “sense of national unity,” and that to be “opportunistic” with an agenda instead could lead to more radicalization.

“The more we alienate people, the more difficult it is to prevent radicalization,” Breen said. “It is not good policy to categorize large parts of your population as outside the national identity.”

*******************************

Read Tal’s complete article at the link.

The Trump/Sessions/Bannon/Miller White Nationalist restrictionist immigration agenda has NEVER been about protecting America from terrorism. That’s just a smokescreen for an unrelenting (and counterproductive) program of racist, antiMuslim, anti-foreigner hysteria. In other words, the White Nationalist agenda of dividing and destroying America as we know it.

PWS

12-13-17

PREVENTABLE HUMAN DISASTER: THE WANTON CRUELTY, WASTEFULNESS, & TOTAL STUPIDITY OF THE TRUMP/SESSIONS “GONZO” IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT PROGRAM PORTRAYED IN GRAPHIC HUMAN TERMS — The Damage To America Of Mistreating Our Families & Our Citizen Youth Will Long Outlive The Misguided Officials Carrying It Out!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/classic-apps/deported-divided-how-a-moms-return-to-el-salvador-tore-her-family-in-two/2017/12/08/70f81724-9a37-11e7-87fc-c3f7ee4035c9_story.html

Maria Sacchetti reports in the Washington Post:

Bermudez works all the time, so Cruz Mendez cares for Steve from afar. She calls the babysitter after school to make sure he arrived safely. She checks on his health insurance and his dental appointments.

Steve no longer asks when the family will be together.

In Falls Church, Cruz Mendez was an independent woman with a salary and dreams for the future. Now she sits inside the little gray house. Bermudez cannot afford to send her money for college, so she has set those plans aside.

Over the phone, he urges her to have faith that they will be together again.

She still wears her wedding ring, and he still wears his.

Bermudez works all the time, so Cruz Mendez cares for Steve from afar. She calls the babysitter after school to make sure he arrived safely. She checks on his health insurance and his dental appointments.

Steve no longer asks when the family will be together.

In Falls Church, Cruz Mendez was an independent woman with a salary and dreams for the future. Now she sits inside the little gray house. Bermudez cannot afford to send her money for college, so she has set those plans aside.

Over the phone, he urges her to have faith that they will be together again.

She still wears her wedding ring, and he still wears his.

Bermudez works all the time, so Cruz Mendez cares for Steve from afar. She calls the babysitter after school to make sure he arrived safely. She checks on his health insurance and his dental appointments.

Steve no longer asks when the family will be together.

In Falls Church, Cruz Mendez was an independent woman with a salary and dreams for the future. Now she sits inside the little gray house. Bermudez cannot afford to send her money for college, so she has set those plans aside.

Over the phone, he urges her to have faith that they will be together again.

She still wears her wedding ring, and he still wears his.

Maria Sacchetti reports in the Washington Post:

“Cruz Mendez, 30, made this trip in reverse when she was 18 years old, skipping her high school graduation to flee a neighborhood man who had harassed her in San Salvador. She was detained at the U.S.-Mexico border, released and allowed to join her brother in Virginia. Two months later, an immigration judge in Texas ordered her deported. Cruz Mendez says she never knew about the hearing.

In Fairfax, she was crowned beauty queen at a local Salvadoran festival and met Rene Bermudez, a hazel-eyed laborer who worked construction.

Steve was born in 2007, Danyca in 2012.

Late in 2013, police stopped Cruz Mendez for failing to turn on the lights on her minivan and charged her with driving without a license, an arrest that alerted federal agents to her old deportation order.

While President Barack Obama deported high numbers of undocumented immigrants during parts of his tenure, parents of American citizens with little to no criminal record were not priorities for expulsion. So officials released Cruz Mendez with orders to stay out of trouble and check in with them once a year.

But under President Trump, who campaigned on a promise to crack down on illegal immigration, anyone here without papers can be expelled.

Interior deportations — of people already living in the United States, as opposed to those caught crossing the border — have risen 37 percent since Trump took office. Deportation arrests of non-criminals such as Cruz Mendez — many, like her, with children who were born in this country and are U.S. citizens — surged past 31,000 from inauguration to the end of September, triple the same period last year.

On the May morning when she was scheduled for her yearly check-in, Cruz Mendez lingered in the apartment, which she’d decorated with family photographs, Danyca’s art projects and Steve’s citizen-of-the-month award from elementary school.

She considered the possibility of skipping the check-in, aware of other longtime immigrants who had been deported after similar appointments. But she could not fathom life as a fugitive. Worried, Bermudez warned her that she was going to be late.

“Why are you trying to turn me over so fast?” Cruz Mendez snapped in Spanish.

She eventually walked into the immigration agency’s Fairfax office, accompanied by advocates and loved ones. Agents took her into custody as her supporters shouted.

For a month, her husband and lawyers fought to free her. Steve tried, too, writing letters to Immigration and Customs Enforcement that were full of pleas and questions.

“Plz don’t deport my mom,” one of the letters said.

Who will take me to the doctor, the dentist? Who will take care of me and my sister? Who will I live with?

It didn’t work. On June 14, they sent her back. Bermudez and the kids filled a giant cardboard box with her dresses and shoes, pots and pans, and placed it by the front door, waiting for a courier to take it away.

Steve Bermudez, 10, wrote immigration officials in May to ask them not to deport his mother. For a month, Cruz Mendez’s husband and lawyers fought to free her and stop the deportation. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

Steve looks out the window of the bedroom he used in his mother’s childhood home in El Salvador. The sign advertises fruit and vegetables his family sells. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
‘How can I go?’
Deportations can shatter a family or a marriage. In one study of the aftermath of six immigration raids, family income dropped an average of 70 percent. Another study, of U.S.-born Latino children, found that those whose parents had been detained or deported experienced significantly higher post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms than their peers.

“That child’s more likely to be poor. They’re more likely to be depend on public benefits,” said Randy Capps, U.S. research director for the Migration Policy Institute. “And then psychologically, you just don’t know. There could be an immediate impact; it could be a long time before that psychological impact shows up.”

In the Falls Church apartment, Steve and Danyca cried all the time after Cruz Mendez was deported. No one wanted to eat.

. . . .

Bermudez works all the time, so Cruz Mendez cares for Steve from afar. She calls the babysitter after school to make sure he arrived safely. She checks on his health insurance and his dental appointments.

Steve no longer asks when the family will be together.

In Falls Church, Cruz Mendez was an independent woman with a salary and dreams for the future. Now she sits inside the little gray house. Bermudez cannot afford to send her money for college, so she has set those plans aside.

Over the phone, he urges her to have faith that they will be together again.

She still wears her wedding ring, and he still wears his.“

****************************

Read Maria’s entire story of this grotesque failure of responsible government, common sense, and human decency at the link!

THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS FUTURE

What kind of country abuses its youth — our hope for the future — this way? What kind of county wastes its human capital and potential in this manner? What kind of country empowers leaders who are intentionally cruel, immoral, dishonest, and stupid? What kind of country intentionally turns valued friends and positive contributors into potential disgruntled enemies?

This is the way that a once great nation transforms itself into an “overstuffed banana republic!”

But, it’s not yet too late to change the grim vision of “Christmas Future” being promoted by Trump, Sessions, Kelly, Homan, Bannon, Miller, and their cronies. We can resist the horrible policies of the Trump Administration in the courts of law and the courts of public opinion! Ultimately, totally unqualified officials like Trump, Sessions, and their White Nationalist cronies — who are plotting the end of America as we know it — can be defeated at the ballot box and removed from office.

But, there will come a “point of no return” when the damage done by these corrupt individuals and their enablers (both willing and unwitting) cannot be undone! Are we as smart, human, and capable of leaving behind selfishness and embracing decency and human kindness as Ebineezer Scrooge? Or will the Ghost prove to be the Prophet in this version of the Christmas Carol?

PWS

12-09-17

THE INTERCEPT: “Internal Emails Show ICE Agents Struggling to Substantiate Trump’s Lies About Immigrants”

https://theintercept.com/2017/10/04/ice-raids-trump-immigration-deportation/

Alice Speri reports:

“AS HUNDREDS OF undocumented immigrants were rounded up across the country last February in the first mass raids of the Trump administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials went out of their way to portray the people they detained as hardened criminals, instructing field offices to highlight the worst cases for the media and attempting to distract attention from the dozens of individuals who were apprehended despite having no criminal background at all.

On February 10, as the raids kicked off, an ICE executive in Washington sent an “URGENT” directive to the agency’s chiefs of staff around the country. “Please put together a white paper covering the three most egregious cases,” for each location, the acting chief of staff of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations wrote in the email. “If a location has only one egregious case — then include an extra egregious case from another city.”

The email indicated the assignment was due that night, but a day later, an agent at ICE’s San Antonio office sent an internal email saying the team had come up short. “I have been pinged by HQ this morning indicating that we failed at this tasking,” the agent wrote.

As the hours passed, the pressure on local agents to come up with something grew more intense. “As soon as you come in, your sole focus today will be compiling three egregious case write-ups,” an assistant field office director at the agency’s Austin Resident Office wrote to that team on February 12, noting that the national and San Antonio offices were growing impatient. “HQ and SNA will ping us in the afternoon for sure.”

Then the agent added that a team of officers had “just picked up a criminal a few minutes ago, so get with him for your first egregious case.”

. . . .

There is no question that there are lives at stake.

While Austin’s comments on the retaliatory nature of the Travis County raids drew fleeting attention to the politicization of federal enforcement operations, Coronilla-Guerrero, the man whose case was under review that day, was eventually deported, despite his wife telling the judge that his life would be at risk in Mexico, from where he had fled because of gang threats.

Last month, armed men dragged Coronilla-Guerrero out of the relatives’ home where he had been staying in the state of Guanajuato, while he was asleep with one of his children. His body was found on the street the next morning.“

*****************************

Read the complete article, with copies of internal memos, at the link.

Hardly surprising that the Administration’s “Migrant Menace” narrative is bogus. Also, not surprising that under Trump agents are being required to basically fabricate support for the false narratives. Someday, probably long after I’m gone, all the records of this Administration will become public. I predict that they will show that the fraud, waste, and abuse documented here is just the “tip of the iceberg” of monumental dishonesty of this Administration on the subject of immigration.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the recent DOJ/EOIR claims that statistics support the effectiveness of the “Judge Surge” involves this type of manipulation of evidence to document a pre-determined conclusion demanded by Trump Politicos and intended to disguise the truth.

PWS

10-04-17

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